Stanford University Libraries invites you to celebrate the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania at Cubberley Auditorium.

The evening will feature “The Other Dream Team,” a film about the remarkable story of the Lithuanian basketball team that won the 1992 Olympic Bronze medal less than a year after Lithuania broke away from the Soviet Union. Watch the movie trailer here.

Lithuanian cultural historian Violeta Davoliute-Opgenorth will answer questions after the film and also discuss how basketball was a form of resistance through her talk, “Fact, Fiction and Memory: Representations of the Postwar Fight for Lithuanian Independence From Soviet Times to the Present.” She will outline the various ways Lithuanians resisted Soviet rule during the second half of the 20th century. Lithuania was the first republic to declare independence from the Soviet Union on March 11, 1990, an act that led to an economic blockade from Moscow but also catalyzed the breakup of the USSR in August 1991.
Dr. Violeta Davoliute-Opgenorth is a senior researcher at the Department of Contemporary History, Vilnius University. She has published widely on the cultural history of Lithuania and Eastern Europe and is the author of The Making and Breaking of Soviet Lithuania: Memory and Modernity in the Wake of War, published by Routledge in 2013.

The event, which is in English, aims to bring together Stanford faculty, staff and students as well as local Baltic communities and people interested in Baltic heritage. It is free and open to the public.